Salesforce updates Community Cloud with Lightning interface, personalization, social improvements

Salesforce updated its Community Cloud with its Lighting user interface and a bevy of new features for personalization, search optimization, themes and recommendation.

Lightning Customer Communities is an update that makes Salesforce's Community Cloud more mobile friendly and personal based on profiles. Salesforce's Community Cloud combines Web sites, portals and social capabilities.

Mike Stone, senior vice president of product marketing, Salesforce Community Cloud, said this release is the largest one since launch in 2013. "This was two years of development," said Stone. "The goal was to update the interface and put proactive intelligence throughout the community."

Here's a look at a few screenshots:

New features include:

• Themes for personalized brand experiences for multiple devices.
• Experiences based on profiles of different member types.
• Rich media feed that can handle videos, images, code snippets and file previews. The feed also has a Q&A format similar to Quora.
• Recommendations for articles and answers based on search scoring.
• Search optimization to direct queries and surface community content.
• Moderation tools for community managers to nix spam and unwanted posts.
• Dashboards for purchasing patterns, content and community engagement.
• Drag and drop e-commerce modules from third parties such as CloudCraze, Magento and Demandware for community pages.